Abstract

Bendōwa is the earliest extant doctrinal text by Dōgen (1200–1253), revered today as the founding patriarch of the Japanese Sōtō School of Zen Buddhism. It may well be regarded as Dōgen’s declaration of independence as a Buddhist enlightened master. Narratives play an important part in this seminal document: they serve to legitimate Dōgen, to place his teaching in the history of the Buddhist tradition, and to explicate various points in the discussion of his doctrine. Narratological analysis elucidates the structural characteristics of the narrative parts of Bendōwa and helps to clarify their meaning and functionality. It may even be successsfully applied to non-narrative, argumentative sections of the text.

Abstract

Bendōwa is the earliest extant doctrinal text by Dōgen (1200–1253), revered today as the founding patriarch of the Japanese Sōtō School of Zen Buddhism. It may well be regarded as Dōgen’s declaration of independence as a Buddhist enlightened master. Narratives play an important part in this seminal document: they serve to legitimate Dōgen, to place his teaching in the history of the Buddhist tradition, and to explicate various points in the discussion of his doctrine. Narratological analysis elucidates the structural characteristics of the narrative parts of Bendōwa and helps to clarify their meaning and functionality. It may even be successsfully applied to non-narrative, argumentative sections of the text.

Article Networks

TrendTerms

TrendTerms displays relevant terms of the abstract of this publication and related documents on a map. The terms and their relations were extracted from ZORA using word statistics. Their timelines are taken from ZORA as well. The bubble size of a term is proportional to the number of documents where the term occurs. Red, orange, yellow and green colors are used for terms that occur in the current document; red indicates high interlinkedness of a term with other terms, orange, yellow and green decreasing interlinkedness. Blue is used for terms that have a relation with the terms in this document, but occur in other documents.
You can navigate and zoom the map. Mouse-hovering a term displays its timeline, clicking it yields the associated documents.